CLAIRE LADDS

Author of character-driven psychological literary fiction and other darker books, all with an emotional pull

Books and Reading

Spell the Month in Books: February

by 3 Comments

Here I am again with my spell the Month in Books choices! This time, I’m looking at a bookstack of crime and mystery stories which I have on my shelves and which contain a whole host of fantastic characters, whether detective/sleuth or criminal.

Here’s my list of books:

Fear in the Sunlight – Nicola Upson

Except the Dying – Maureen Jennings

Brat Farrar – Josephine Tey

Raffles – E.W. Hornung

Unnatural Habits – Kerry Greenwood

And then There Were None – Agatha Christie

Riddle of the Third Mile (The) – Colin Dexter

You Let Me In – Lucy Clarke

Fear in the Sunlight is one of Nicola Upson’s wonderful mysteries set between the wars and featuring the writer, Josephine Tey, as the sleuth. While Josephine is on holiday in Portmeiron to celebrate a friend’s fortieth birthday and to sign a film deal with Alfred Hitchcock for a novel she’s written, one of the group becomes the unfortunate object of a brutal and gruesome murder. The next day, it happens to another one of the party. Is there a serial killer on the loose? Josephine joins forces with Chief Inspector Penrose to find out as suspicion grows rife among the remaining guests and they fear for their lives.

The fantastic Victorian detective William Murdoch appears in Except the Dying. It is 1895, and the body of a pregnant girl is discovered in a freezing cold street in Toronto. Murdoch soon begins to think that her murder may well be an attempt to disguise the knowledge that she had been embroiled with a man belonging to one of the affluent families in the city. I find Murdoch such an endearing character, and I love his quirkiness, his inventiveness and his relationships with the other characters. As someone who has watched all of the Murdoch Mysteries episodes (many times!), it’s very difficult not to envisage Yannick Bisson as the Murdoch of the book. I don’t have a problem with that in the slightest…!

Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar gives the writer another mention in this particular bookstack, although this time, as the non-fictional version! I’m going to be honest and say that, although I’ve owned Brat Farrar quite a while, I’ve not yet read it. But I must! A man has been coached on every possible detail of the supposedly dead Patrick Ashby, who died at the age of thirteen, in order to claim his inheritance. But dark secrets emerge that threaten both Brat Farrar’s plan and his life, the longer he continues his deception.

Raffles is one in my bookstack which most certainly is not a sleuth-style crime book! In fact, it is quite the opposite, and is the first in a series of witty stories exploring the world of crime from the viewpoint of the thieves. In this first story, Raffles: The Amateur Crackman, Raffles’ schoolboy friend, Bunny Manders, enlists his help to get him out of gambling debt which has mounted up so badly that he almost shoots himself directly in front of Raffles. And so begin the adventures – starting with a daring robbery of a jewellers. This should keep Bunny out of trouble now, surely?

I really love Kerry Greenwood’s lady detective, Phryne Fisher, and Unnatural Habits sees Phryne and her maid-come-sidekick, Dot, getting involved in a series of disappearances. The victims all have something in common: they are blonde-haired girls, and three of the are definitely pregnant. They also all have one other connection – they work at the Magdalene Laundry. An intrepid female journalist is also on the case, and it’s not too long before she also goes missing. Phryne needs to do something about this before any more girls vanish without trace. What I always find thoroughly endearing about Phryne is her capability of using everything within her power – her wealth and position, certainly, but also her femininity and her empathy and understanding with all women and girls placed in dreadful situations, because there is so much more to this lady detective than beautiful clothes and a privileged lifestyle.

My all-time favourite crime writer once again appears in my bookstack. Agatha Christie wrote a number of standalone crime stories, some thriller, some with a dark Gothic feel or occult element, and some incredible mysteries. And Then There Were None, I think, combines all of these, and it is one of my absolute favourites of the standalones. Ten strangers are ‘invited’ to a house on an isolated island in Devon by the mysterious U.N. Owen. During their first dinner together, a record containing the voice of the mysterious host begins to accuse each of the guests of hiding a terrible secret and, before the end of the evening, one of the guests ends up dead. It doesn’t take long for the remaining guests to realise that the killer must be on the island, and worse, that it is one of them – and whoever it is is going to kill again and again…

Ah, now, Inspector Morse. I’ve never come across a Morse book or episode that I didn’t like. I might have cheated (just a tiny bit) by ignoring ‘the’ in the title, but the book itself hopefully makes up for it. As usual, this book sees the detective display his usual contempt for the dons of Oxford, as the torso of one of them, Browne-Smith (or at least Morse believes it could be) is fished out of the Oxford canal. Browne-Smith has disappeared and it appears that an event that happened in World War II may be the motive for the murder, but is it really? And is the dismembered body actually Browne-Smith or another victim entirely? There are suspects galore, and endless twists and turns to this one. Riddle of the Third Mile is definitely one to read for its complexity and if you love a plot to throw you in every possible direction.

I failed in my last letter, as I had to repeat last month’s book! Who would have thought it was so difficult for me to find a crime book beginning with ‘y’ on my bookcases?! So here we are again with You Let Me In. Briefly, as I described the book last month, I can tell you that Elle has felt very strange since renting out her house. Then she starts to receive threats which suggest that the person who is in her house now knows about her past – and what she did. What exactly do they know, and what are they going to do about it? And why is her imagination hearing footsteps, seeing shadows? It is in her imagination, isn’t it?

I hope that you might be inspired to read some of the books in my February bookstack. If I was going to point you to one in particular, if you’ve never read it, then be sure to read And Then There Were None. There is also an absolutely amazing three-part adaptation of the book on Amazon Prime Video, which I didn’t bother renting but bought outright and have watched countless times (Charles Dance and Sam Neill star, so what’s not to love?!). I thought it was fantastic and exceptionally well done. I will definitely be writing more on this story, and in detail on the adaptation of this, and many other Christie stories, in the coming weeks.

Doing this is also showing me that I really do need to read more of my Josephine Tey collection, and get around to curling up with Lucy Clarke’s book. Although I’m not sure that I’m going to feel very warm and cosy once I get going. I think I might be checking my door..! Sounds thrilling. 🙂

Happy reading!

Read Christie 2021: my January book choice – Crooked House

by Leave a Comment

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was participating in the #ReadChristie2021 challenge, and as well as telling you what the official Agatha Christie team have chosen for their January read (The Hollow), I said that I had opted to read something different.

January’s challenge is to read a Christie book set in a grand house. Instead of The Hollow, I chose Crooked House, a book that I first read when I was about sixteen, and which I have recently watched on TV – in fact, this probably prompted my choice because I wanted to compare the original with the adaptation.

Plot

The Leonides family live together in a huge house on the edge of London. They had no idea that one of them could be capable of murder until Aristide Leonides, head of the household, was found poisoned.

Leonides had a regular injection of insulin which the murderer had substituted for eserine. Was the murderer a bit stupid? Whoever it was had not even removed the incriminating evidence. Or was there something much more sinister, much more evil at work here?

Charles Hayward is the son of the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. He also is about to marry one of the household, Sophia Leonides. Solving this murder therefore becomes his priority and he sets about tracking down the culprit. But will the murderer strike again and, if so, who could possibly be next on the list – and why?

Of the standalone novels, it, for me, stands out as one of the best. It certainly didn’t fail me on that score when re-reading it this month. It has all the hallmarks of classic Golden Age mystery – the amateur sleuth, a tight cast of characters in a closed setting, in this case the English Country House, and one hell of a puzzle to solve. And in this case, it has the added impetus of making the reader seriously question their detecting beliefs, and what they actually want to believe. It is truly incredible (and I mean that in as many ways as you wish to take it).

I think of it often as I’m scanning my Christie bookshelves as one of the stories that really packed a punch for me because it left me truly shocked. No spoilers here, but if you’ve never read Crooked House, I thoroughly recommend it.

I would love to know if you decided to take up the Read Christie 2021 challenge, and if you did, what you decided to read for January and what you thought about your choice. Have you read Crooked House previously and, if so, what did you think of it (try to avoid spoilers in your comments, or mark them clearly beforehand, please, so others who don’t know the story can choose to skip over them).

Happy reading!

Spell the Month in Books: January

by Leave a Comment

I began getting involved in ‘Spell the Month in Books’ on Instagram last year, having come across the hashtag and decided it looked like fun. If you don’t know, the idea is that you gather together a bookstack of titles and create the name of the relevant month with the first letter of the title of each book.

This year, I have decided to try and find books that fit into the crime and/or mystery category, and which I currently have in paperback in my bookcases. I can tell you already that finding certain letters of the month has been a challenge, and as much as I would love not to repeat a book in the twelve bookstacks for the year, I get the distinct feeling that there might be one or two that I have no choice to repeat, unless I go out and deliberately buy books beginning with specific letters! I’m resisting doing that, as I have so many unread books that I’m determined to use ones I’ve got.

This is my chosen Spell the Month in Books bookstack for January:

Jamaica Inn – Daphne du Maurer

Among the Mad – Jacqueline Winspear

Nemesis – Agatha Christie

Under the Dragon’s Tail – Maureen Jennings

A Shilling for Candles – Josephine Tey

Return of Sherlock Holmes (The) – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

You Let Me In – Lucy Clarke

You’ll notice a few Golden Age (or modern versions of Golden Age) mysteries among this lot – and being the Agatha Christie obsessive that I am, I couldn’t resist adding one in. However, this group ranges from Victorian to contemporary, and spans detective, suspense and thriller books.

Jamaica Inn combines the Gothic elements of landscape that Daphne du Maurice made so famous in her incredible book, Rebecca, with crime and dark deeds in Cornwall. Labelled as a suspense novel, there are enough dark deeds for me to include this in a set of crime books. When Mary ignores the coachman who warns her against travelling to her aunt at Jamaica Inn, she becomes ravelled in a whole host of villainy going on inside the house. Can she trust the mysterious stranger she meets there? Because she falls in love with him, and danger lurks everywhere.

Jacqueline Winspear’s Among the Mad is one in a series of mystery novels set in post-World War I Britain, featuring her sleuth, Maisie Dobbs. Maisie is drafted in by Scotland Yard after she sees a man commit suicide on a street in London, followed by threats to the Government by a lunatic who threatens mass destruction of people if certain demand are not met. It leads Maisie down a dark route to discover who could possibly be able to commit such atrocity, and to stop him before it is too late.

Nemesis is one of the much later novels of Agatha Christie and features the indisputably astute Miss Marple. When an old acquaintance dies and sets her a challenge of solving an old crime and setting right a wrong, Miss Marple takes it with relish. Thus, the wheels are set in motion to solve the mystery and discover a killer. The only problem is, she has been given absolutely no clue as to who is involved in this mystery or when the crime happened. A curious puzzle…

Under the Dragon’s Tail is a Murdoch Mysteries novel. The murder of Dolly Merishaw is not really unexpected. She was a midwife and abortionist for both high and lowborn, but held every one of her ‘clients’ in contempt and derision. One week later, a boy is found murdered in Dolly’s kitchen, leaving Murdoch to chase down a murderer. Or just maybe there were two on the loose.

A Shilling for Candles sets Alan Grant of Scotland yard on the trail of a murder – but where to start, and how to end? A young screen actress washes up on the south coast, but it seems that everyone the Inspector comes across during his investigation wanted her dead. There are more false and puzzling clues and dead ends than the Inspector knows what to do with!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle caved in to public pressure after the publication in 1902 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and resurrected his famous detective in (The) Return of Sherlock Holmes. The tales in this collection see Holmes returning to London to recount the tales of his life between 1891-4 (the time between Holmes’ supposed death and his ‘present day’).

You Let Me In in a psychological thriller by Lucy Clarke. Being a sucker for red, black and white, the cover on this (although more grey than black) sold it to me, to try. Yes, I did actually buy this for the cover, initially! Ella is a writer; she uses her imagination every day. But something doesn’t feel right when she rents out her house. It feels like someone is watching her. As threats arrive and she feels trapped in her own home, she knows that someone has discovered the secret of her past.

I hope that this makes you think about the books on your bookshelves, and maybe you now fancy taking part in #spellthemonthinbooks too. Can you create a bookstack for January, and can you create it in just one genre (although you don’t have to in the slightest)? Maybe yours would be a virtual stack of ebooks. I haven’t tried that yet – maybe that’s my challenge for next year! I’d love to know what your books for January are/would be, so do please pop them in the comments, or you can email me at claire@claireladds.com with your choices.

I also hope that I might have encouraged you to try one of the books in my bookstack! Just so you know, if you do happen to purchase any of them through my links, I may earn a very small commission (depending on the country you’re in) at no extra cost to you. I’ve only linked to the ones I’ve actually read – not ones that are sitting in my ‘to be read’ pile, so you know that if I’ve linked to it, I thoroughly recommend it.

Happy reading!

Read Christie 2021 Challenge

by Leave a Comment

You may have gathered elsewhere on this blog that I am a complete Agatha Christie obsessive and have been for decades. So when I saw on the Agatha Christie website that the third Read Christie challenge was to take place this year, I jumped at the chance to get involved.

The Read Christie 2021 challenge involves choosing and reading a Christie story each month, based on a list of predetermined criteria chosen by the lovely folks over on the Agatha Christie website. For example, the January challenge is to read a Christie story which is set in a grand house.

There are certainly some options there, as one of the frequent traits of Golden Age mysteries was the setting of the country house. This narrowed both setting and cast of characters for the detective who was solving the puzzle. Had it been December, my immediate choice would have been Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. To be fair, I still could, as could you! But more on my personal choice shortly. As you can see, I’ve got plenty of books to choose from!

My immediate thoughts for this challenge are Christie’s very first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Style, and Styles house also features once more in Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. I also think Crooked House and Peril at End House are excellent options. You could certainly also include The Secret of Chimneys in this, as well as maybe the other Chimneys novel, The Seven Dials Mystery, and possibly The Sittaford Mystery, too.

If you want to get involved, you can find out absolutely everything you need to know about the Read Christie 2021 challenge at www.agathachristie.com. There you will find a complete list of monthly challenges, including a suggested list of books relating to each topic and the Agatha Christie team’s monthly choices, too. There’s also a hashtag to use on Instagram and Twitter, if you’re posting about your reads: #ReadChristie2021.

If you do join in, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll be blogging about my monthly choice (without spoilers) here, towards the end of each month, and announcing what my following month’s read will be.

My January read, which has to be set in a grand house, is Crooked House.

Happy reading (Christie or otherwise)!

Magic, Mystery and Agatha Christie (fiction that made me a writer)

by Leave a Comment

fiction that made me a writer by Claire Ladds

I am almost positive that, if you’re reading this, you have memories of books and stories which have stayed with you long after you first read them, or that have inspired you, or influenced you in some way. I know I have. There are some that have been way more inspirational than I ever could have realised at the time, and these have definitely influenced, not just me as a reader, but the writer in me, too.

The tiny reader ‘me’ gobbles stories

There are books I remember reading as a small child which gave to me, I’m sure, a love of the written word and the power of its magic. I remember vividly my one and only hardback copy of Twinkle. For the life of me now, I can’t remember what was inside, but the feeling I get when I think of it is that books are magical, transportive; the feel of it, the sight of it, the formation of the pages gave me joy and still does, even in memory.

I had a number of Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men books on my shelf, too, which I devoured every day, over and over. Okay, I’m going to admit now that I have a bit of an OCD thing going on when it comes to books and films I love. I obsess about them and read or watch them compulsively and repetitively to the point of driving others bonkers! Anyway, back to the Mr Men… I absolutely loved the characterisation, which is no surprise because character is my favourite aspect of any book. When my brother was in the bathroom, I used to get him to call out two Mr men titles and I’d read the stories to him through the bathroom door (he’ll love me for sharing that!). This reading aloud, though, may well have given me an appreciation of the weight and function of words, and of sound patterns such as alliteration – even though I didn’t know it as such then, but I’m a complete alliteration lover in adulthood.

On a slightly darker note, and much more in keeping with me as a writer, the Mr Men stories also gave me a huge appreciation for the way a threat may come to pass, or a lesson can be learned the hard way, and the endings of these books left an indelible mark on my child sponge brain. I loved this unnerving aspect, the psychological element, and this feeling of just desserts, which created an easy point of transition to my subsequent obsession with Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books. In fact, I’ve still got all fifteen of them, spines and edges a bit tattered and well-thumbed. The mystery and the need to solve it completely captivated me. The characters felt like friends, right down to Scamper the dog! Reading each mystery adventure, I felt a thrill as each clue was uncovered and I was with the gang all the way, trying to solve the case. At the age of seven or eight, I had no idea that my brain was in training for what was going to become the big passion of my life.

Everything changed with Agatha Christie!

At the grand old age of ten, my dad bought me my first Poirot novel, The ABC Murders. This I devoured quicker than a bar of Cadbury’s (and that’s saying something, believe me!). I absolutely fell in love with Poirot, if that’s a thing you can do with the little Belgian detective. Ever since then I’ve had an enduring and obsessive passion for Agatha Christie’s work and, more generally, the detective story.

Author Claire Ladds' Agatha Christie bookcase
I’m a Christie fangirl!

I used to go into WH Smith’s and stand there, staring at the giant triple shelving that held all the Agatha Christie books. The poor man who served behind the counter where the posh fountain pens were, must have been absolutely sick of me standing with my back pressed against his glass case while I gawped at all the Poirot and Marple mysteries. My passion for Poirot only got deeper when I went home one day, clutching Sad Cypress. Even writing this now, the memory of reading that book is creating a feeling inside me that I literally have no words to describe. I will come back to my utter obsession for Agatha Christie and, in particular, Poirot, in another post, but it’s safe to say that the ball was set rolling for every spare penny I had to be spent on indulging my need to read mysteries and crime fiction.

Writing as a reader

People have said to me for years that I should write my own crime or mystery books, that I would be good at it. For decades I’ve struggled to believe that. The accepted notion that, if you read obsessively in a genre then it will make you more instinctively pulled towards writing it has, up to now, not seemed to work for me. I admire the structural complexities of the crime and mystery plot immensely, possibly to the point of reverence. For years, though, I’ve not thought it was something I could emulate. I convinced myself that I wouldn’t be able to construct such a story very well: the red herrings would be too obvious, the perpetrator too easily guessed. I just kept adding to this list or reasons why I’d be no good at writing a book with crime in it.

But, through my own written work, I’ve come to recognise that it’s not the thrill of the chase, or even necessarily the ‘whodunnit’ element that intrigues me, but the ‘why’. Why does a character commit a physical or moral crime? What drives them? What circumstances could cause someone to do something that goes against their own character and beliefs? The psychology of the characters is what I’m interested in (is that possibly because I’m a Poirot fangirl to my core?!). This essential notion of what intrigues me as a reader and a writer is what I’ve extracted from my decades of reading – and watching, it has to be said – crime and mystery fiction: the truths behind the characters, the truths that inhabit human nature, the thoughts, passions, torments that we hold inside ourselves and the ways we choose to act on them. Or not. The way they enact themselves on our psyche. How they form and re-form characters.

So, it seems that I knew exactly the kind of books I loved, and the kind of stories that were bound to be the ones I’d write. I figured out that character psychology was my ‘thing’. It was all falling into place, wasn’t it? Well, not exactly, because something came along to throw a massive spanner in the works. Why would I make this easy for myself? After all, I love stories in which you’ve got to try and figure out what’s going on…!

Next time, I’ll explain just what it was – or who is was – that threw the quest to discover the answer to my writer self into a turmoil that lasted for decades.

And lastly, but my no means least, I’d like to say a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Agatha Christie, who was born on 15th September 1890. She would have been 130 today!

[For the sake of transparency, any links in this post are my affiliate links. I may make a tiny commission if you purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.]